The Under $800 VMware Quad-Core 32GB Home Lab

Sep 5, 2014 • Jonathan Frappier

Updated 4/20/2016 The under $800 home lab is now under $700!
Because I am a geek, and my needs change, and this is what I like to do I often check out new hardware, cost features etc. One of the things I wish I did on my 8-core lab was go for a smaller form factor case. Pricing, as always is subject to change. I actually prefer to buy most of my hardware on Amazon because I seem to have an easier time returning items that are defective but I’ll link to NewEgg. You may be able to find a part or two for a bit less somewhere else which is always good.

Here is a run down on the parts for this VMware home lab build which should be capable of booting nested 64-bit VMs or as a stand alone ESXi host running other VMs since it is cheap (you can get almost 2 of these for the price of my 8-core build).

According to AMD, all Vishera series processors have the VT/RVI feature to allow you to boot 64-bit VMs in a nested hypervisor (http://goo.gl/jPkUMC) I’ll assume you will boot from USB, and that you have plenty of them from conferences past to keep my price under $800 :)

I am in a course this week and a question came up about how to configure the Group and User search base DN and its effect on access within vCAC / vRA. Ultimately permission will be granted as a combination of both fields. First and foremost when configuring vCloud Automation Center for vRealize Automation tenants this will control which users or groups you can assign tenant administrator or infrastructure administrator roles. Let’s look at some examples; if my domain is test.lab and I set my User and Group search base DN to dc=test,dc=lab I will be able to assign either of those roles to any user or group in the entire Active Directory, regardless of what organization unit or container they may be in. Easy enough, but that starts to open things up pretty wide.